cientists usually don’t need to bebig-picture thinkers in order to makeimportant contributions, but biologist EdwardO. Wilson is a big-picture thinker anyway. Heis currently embroiled in a debate addressingthe very foundations of the theory of naturalselection, and back in the ’70s he wasinstrumental in founding my own field: theevolutionary study of human social behavior.Ever since, he has pushed the boundaries ofhuman self-knowledge by identifying andaddressing big questions that arise fromthe facts of human evolution, bringing himrepeatedly into dialogue with scholars fromthe humanities. Now, nearing the end of hiscareer, he has published a volume containinghis views on some of the biggest questionsfacing humanity today, and “the possibilityof unification of the two great branches oflearning” is a central theme.

The Meaning of Human Existence is
not an academic treatise defending a grand
existential vision. It is a loose collection of
thoughts and theories from a scientist with
a talent for asking good questions. Topics
include the nature of morality and religion,
neurobiological approaches to consciousness
and free will, the role of group selection in
social evolution, the ethics of engineering
human genomes, some absolutely fascinating
facts about ants, and, as I’ve mentioned, the
goal of unifying science and the humanities.
Using knowledge of human origins, Wilson
contrasts our small role in the workings of the

universe with our large role in the workings
of earth’s ecosystems. In the process, he
hopes to revive the Enlightenment dream
that, “science and the humanities share the
same foundation, in particular that the laws
of physical cause and effect can somehow
account for both.”

As a philosopher who focuses primarily
on causal, physical questions, I find this
notion of unification between science and
the humanities confusing and misleading.
Theoretical unification is important within
science, of course. Key examples are the
modern synthesis of genetics with Darwinian
theory and the unified account of celestial
and earthly bodies provided by Newton’s
theory of gravity. But this is unification
among causal theories, and that entirely
misses the point of a great deal of work in the
humanities, since much of this work doesn’t
address causal questions to begin with. To

Hamlet, for example, is not to provide a causalexplanation for anything. Nor are these causalquestions: What is the moral significanceof altering human genomes? How can weobserve the facts that neurological correlatesof consciousness are supposed to be correlatedwith? Are scientific beliefs more likely to betrue than other beliefs? If so, why?

I couldn’t agree more that, “The task of
understanding humanity is too important
and too daunting to leave exclusively to the
humanities.” But we need not accept that
science can answer non-causal questions in
a “testable” way in order to recognize that
science has important implications for many
non-causal questions. Instead of unification,
what we need is interaction between these two
basic forms of inquiry. Scholars and scientists
should simply work together to identify the
important implications of science for human
life. This is an excellent way to advance our
knowledge of ourselves, but it is nothing like
the unification of theories that occurs within
science. Photo by Charles Jischke. Mural by Zach Medler.